Zigante Truffle Days opens the season in Istria
Livade's truffle fair runs six weeks around the valley that produced the largest white truffle on record, found by Giancarlo Zigante in 1999.
Zigante Truffle Days opens in Livade, Istria, on 3 October and runs daily through 1 November, the centrepiece of a season built around the largest white truffle ever recorded.
The event takes over the main square of Livade, a hamlet in the Mirna river valley best known for the shop and restaurant that Zigante Tartufi, the valley's most prominent truffle house, has run there for decades. Producers weigh and sell fresh Tuber magnatum by the gram through the month, as the autumn haul from the surrounding oak and hazel woods comes in.
A record that still stands
A truffle the size of a loaf of bread, cooked once in 1999 and never sold.
The company's name comes from Giancarlo Zigante, a local truffle hunter who, with his dog Diana, found a 1.31kg white truffle near Buje on 2 November 1999. Guinness World Records still lists it as the largest white truffle ever found.
Zigante named it "Millennium," had it cast in bronze, then cooked and served it to around a hundred guests in Istria rather than selling it on. The bronze cast now sits in the Zigante Tartufi shop in Livade, a quieter rival to the marble and velvet of Piedmont's own truffle trade.
Six weeks of festivals
Zigante Truffle Days is the longest fixture in a wider calendar, Istrian White Truffle Days, that runs from 5 September to 8 November across three towns. Motovun opened the season in September with its Subotina festival in nearby Buzet; a Teran and Truffle Festival follows in Motovun on 17-18 October, then Livade's own Tuber Food Fest on 24-25 October, before Buzet closes the run on 7-8 November.
The timing overlaps almost exactly with Piedmont's Alba truffle fair, across the Adriatic, where this year's opening prices ran as high as €8,000 a kilo — a reminder that Tuber magnatum doesn't recognise borders, even if its reputation still runs mostly through Italy.
For Livade, a village of a few hundred people, six weeks of fairs are as much about proving the point as selling the crop: Istria grows the same truffle, under the same oaks, at a fraction of the name recognition.
